Delivering on UNFPA’s strategic plan: 2022–2023 report – World

The end of 2023 heralded the midpoint of UNFPA’s 2022-2025 Strategic Plan as well as the start of ICPD30, a year-long process of reviewing progress made since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Both offer an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of UNFPA’s work and the challenges ahead, ensuring we can adapt and succeed in delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.

In the last 30 years, the world has made remarkable progress in advancing the sexual and reproductive health and rights of individuals. The number of women using modern contraceptives has doubled since 1994. The number of women dying from preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth has fallen by one third since 2000. The ratio of skilled health personnel has increased 41 per cent between 2000 and 2022. These achievements show that rapid and sustainable progress can be made, when sexual and reproductive health and rights are considered policy priorities.

Yet today the pace of progress is stalling, and by some measures even reversing. As the world grapples with multiple overlapping crises and economic disruptions, inequalities within and among countries are growing, and marginalized people – from LGBTQIA+ people to people of African descent to migrants and persons with disabilities and more – are being left behind. The slowed pace of advancement has put the world significantly off-track in achieving UNFPA’s three transformative results, which aim to end unmet need for family planning, end preventable maternal deaths, and end gender-based violence including harmful practices.

A mid-term review of UNFPA’s Strategic Plan therefore calls for greatly accelerating efforts to achieve these transformative goals, including through internal shifts to respond to growing uncertainty around the world. UNFPA will be strengthening its work addressing discriminatory gender and social norms and changing population dynamics. UNFPA will also be investing in the production of quality population data and enhancing its work in analytics and foresight to better design and implement future-fit programmes.

The mid-term review also found that UNFPA had been able to achieve significant results amid the volatility of recent years. Through 2022 and 2023, UNFPA supported 2.4 million safe births in humanitarian-affected countries, and provided family planning commodities that averted nearly 65,000 maternal deaths and 9.5 million unsafe abortions, in addition to facilitating longer-lasting changes by guiding policy development, strengthening systems and promoting positive social norms. Over the second half of UNFPA’s 2022-2025 Strategic Plan, the organization will build on these achievements, with strong emphasis on: strengthening data analytics capacity and foresight development; promoting innovation, especially innovations by women and youth; strengthening humanitarian response; growing strategic partnerships; addressing the root causes of unmet need, gender-based violence and inequality; and supporting youth-, women- and grassroots-led organizations. As we look ahead to navigating an increasingly unpredictable world, there remains one unshakeable certainty: UNFPA delivers.